My journey through shadows and back again to mental health in words and images.

Monthly Archives: September 2015

A few weeks ago I had the chance to take sometime to enjoy myself at UNAM’s botanical garden here in Mexico City. The botanical garden is part of a natural preserve and is in fact a little bit of a much needed wilderness inside this huge metropolis, which holds several flora and fauna species that present very nice photo opportunities. Taking a walk through it gives priceless moments of peace and joy, and since I love photographing Nature there was no excuse for not taking a camera along, so took one that day, actually, two cameras.

As you may have noticed the Fujifilm X100S has taken a special place in my image making, so I packed it inside my camera bag along with my recent tool of choice for making macrophotography, a Nikon 1 J1 armed with an FT1 Adapter and a Micro-Nikkor 55mm AIS lens, these kit allowed me to enjoy two different approaches of making closeup images. For several years a heavy DSLR and a macro lens have helped me to approach tiny creatures and natural details, but with mirrorless cameras I’m able to capture the small world (and the big one) almost wherever I go, and even when long runs for training or caving trips are the main deal, there’s a much lighter gear choice that I have at hand so I don’t need to keep myself away from my love of photography, so lately I’ve been practicing closeup photography much more with these setup rather than with my DSLR.

Fuji X100S, Velvia Film Simulation.

So, on this occasion after a short running session (really short) I entered the botanical garden where I walked for a while relaxing and recovering my breath and at the same time starting to connect with the place and paying attention to the light, I really wanted to enjoy my time there being by myself so my intentions were to play rather than taking the assignment approach. During the next few hours I switched between the X100S and the J1 combo and since the effective field of view are 35mm and 148.5mm respectively I was able to get a very distinctive feeling with each camera, sure, for getting really close to my subject the J1 was the choice, but with the X100S I had the chance to get as close as 10cm from the subject which in combination with the slightly wide angle field of view, putting the subject into its context and the visual perspective of the images really pleased me.

Nikon 1 J1, FT1 Adapter, Micro-Nikkor 55mm F2.8 AIS

What really made this so much more fun was taking advantage of Fuji’s beautiful film simulations, and since my love of B&W imagery has had me preferred the monochrome aesthetics even with nature and closeup images I really wanted to try the Velvia film simulation taking the photos with the RAW+Jpg activated in the image quality settings. All of the images made that day with the X100S were chosen from the jpgs, so no processing the Raw’s in Lightroom this time, only with the Raw’s from the J1 I spent some time fine tuning contrast and colour, and sharpness to some degree. Using the two cameras was really fun, I loved so much the X100S Velvia look and more environmental feel and the J1’s ability to render the subject really large in the image and that I can be farther from it which gives the advantage of not spoiling the bees and other creatures and when it gets harder to get close because the roughness of the terrain, being made of pure volcanic rocks in this case, or the presence of cactus and other “friendly” flora.